The Insights2020 effort, which also is backed by the Advertising
Research Foundation, global research organization Esomar, WPP and
Millward Brown Vermeer, builds on and is
modeled after the Marketing2020 initiative that concluded last year
with a report in the Harvard
Business Review after input from more than 250 CMOs and 10,000
marketers across 92 countries on how marketing organizations need
to adapt.
“One thing that kept coming out clearly from Marketing2020 is
that the world is changing rapidly,” Mr. Weed said in an interview.
“One of the areas that struck all of us is the area of data. When I
was a brand manager, we were dealing with third-party data from
retailers that was 12 weeks old. With mobile, you have first party
data from consumers in real time. That huge change must have an
impact on how we think about insights.”
New capabilities such as mobile data collection from consumers
should allow “much more insight work more quickly,” he said. “We’re
moving toward it, but we’re not there yet.”
Mr. Weed will chair an Insights2020 advisory board that also
includes Diego Scotti, CMO of Verizon; Rob Norman, chief
digital officer of WPP’s GroupM; Harish Bhat, member of the group
executive council of Tata; Julian Prynn, marketing director-Middle
East of BAT; professor Jerry Wind of Wharton; Barbara Lamprecht,
who handles brand and marketing strategy for Volkswagen; Tony
Fagan, VP-research of Google; ARF CEO Gayle
Fuguitt; and WPP CEO Martin Sorrell.
Preliminary findings from the study will be presented at the
Esomar Congress in September in Dublin.
Part of the work will be identifying companies that are best at
collecting and organizing insights today, with Nike and Apple among
those that come to mind for Mr. Weed. And part is looking at how
research and analytics providers need to adapt to the kind of
disruptive change digital technology is bringing to the area, and
what the industry needs to do to attract more and better
talent.
The same level of innovation that digital technology has brought
to media and content are coming to research and analytics, Mr. Weed
said. “You can either learn from that or end up defending against
it. As they say, if you’re not at the dinner table, you might be on
the menu.”
